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Recommended
Tom Williams, chicagocritic.com
Date Reviewed: June 4, 2006
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Exceptional acting lands dark Irish play
The winner of four Tony Awards in 1998, The Beauty Queen of
Leenane is part of Martin McDonagh’s Leenane Trilogy, which
includes A Skull in Connemara
and Lonesome West. McDonagh
has been described as the most original and serious Irish playwright in
years. In McDonagh’s plays everday banality takes on sinister
undertones. Coupling this with dark comedy and melodramatic plots makes
for interesting theatre. The play showcases McDonagh’s brash humor,
rich language and inventive storytelling in an emotionally realized
production of this dark and bitingly play.
Set in a shabby, isolated cottage in the west of Ireland (excellent set design by Kristopher
Stengrevics), the play tells the darkly comic tale of a mother
and daughter engaged in an epic battle of ordinary life. The mother,
Mag (Debra Rodkin) whines and bullies to get her way while the plain,
unmarried forty-year-old daughter, resentfully carries out the mother’s
every command.
The women spend their days in endless rounds of petty insults and
physical threats as each maneuvers for control of their isolated
existence. When Maureen (Jacqueline Grandt) is offered a chance at love
and a new life with Pato Dooley (Bob Wilson), this once-benign terrain
grows treacherous and the two women, bound by blood but driven by
desperation, will do anything to survive. Pato’s brother Ray (Ken
Still) provides the light relief in this potent family drama.
Full of universal themes as it applies to any place where people are
trapped by circumstances, whether family or social. This play redefines
‘dysfunctional families.’
The cast of four wonderfully talented
actors is lead by Jacqueline Grandt’s beleaguered Maureen Folan who
hates her nagging mother. We see Maureen come apart in a
measured, understated performance.
Debra Rodkin, as
Mag, the mother, got us to hate the evil old lady. Bob Wilson, as Pato
Dooley was charming and Ken Still, as Ray Dooley offered nice comedic
turns.
Make plans to see this terrific play; it will offers laughs and will
surprise you with its ending. This fast-paced production captivates
audiences from the start and transports us into the bleak world of
rural Ireland. This play is wicked,
unpredictable and emotional. Kudos to the cast for sporting authentic
and consistent Irish brogues. Jacqueline Grandt’s performance alone
make this show worth seeing.
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Highly
recommended
THE
BEAUTY QUEEN OF LEENANE In Martin McDonagh's 1996 play, circumstances
have forced a tyrannical mother and her mentally unstable middle-aged
daughter to live together in a relationship that offers them nothing
better to do than torment and bully each other. (What? You thought
women were naturally caring and unselfish?) But in Trudie Kessler's
staging for Actors Workshop Theatre, no one wallows in the script's
grotesque misanthropy. Taking advantage of the intimate playing space,
Debra Rodkin and Jacqueline Grandt generate sympathy, however grudging,
for two neglected women trapped in a cruel battle of wills. --Mary Shen
Barnidge Through 7/9: Fri-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Actors Workshop Theatre,
1044 W. Bryn Mawr, 773-728-7529, $20-$25.
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Dark Family Fable in 'Queen'
By Kerry Reid, Special to the
Tribune
Published June 9, 2006
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Martin McDonagh's breakthrough 1996 play,
"The Beauty Queen of Leenane," only hints at the depravity he'd dig
into with unapologetic gusto in 2003's "The Pillowman" and this year's
Tony-nominated "The Lieutenant of Inishmore."
But what lingers in this Actors Workshop Theatre production of "Beauty
Queen" is the stale air of waste and wistfulness that encloses the
Folan household, where Mag, a cunning crone of 70, and Maureen, her
embittered 40-ish spinster daughter, duel over present-day petty
grievances and old heartaches.
Set in the sort of whitewashed tumbledown cottage made iconic by Irish
playwright J.M. Synge (Kristofer Stengrevics' set is compact but filled
with telling details), McDonagh's play takes every sentimentalized
notion of rural Irish life and smashes it like a pint glass, twisting
the jagged remnants in our faces.
Impotent hatred of the British here isn't a harbinger of revolutionary
fervor, but a symptom of an internal malaise and self-loathing that
cripples everyone in the play.
The only one who escapes semi-clean is Pato Dooley, Maureen's would-be
lover--who, like millions of Irishmen before him, gets away to America.
McDonagh wrote this play before the much-lauded "Celtic Tiger" economic
revival in Ireland, but these characters are so damaged by personal
history that no amount of Euros could save them.
"You can't kick a cow in Leenane without some bastard holding a grudge
20 years," complains Pato. And it's those ancient grudges that drive
the plot machinery.
Bob Wilson's deeply
decent but worn-down Pato and Jacqueline Grandt's haunted and fragile
Maureen are the emotional center of this production, efficiently
directed by Trudie Kessler. Grandt has a remarkable ability to
transform from a lusterless frump to a bright-eyed girlish flirt in the
presence of Pato....
Ken Still as Ray,
Pato's clueless younger brother, ...comes through in the
heartbreakingly funny denouement, and if one hasn't seen the play
before, the cozy quarters at Actors Workshop Theatre allow disturbing
intimacy for this dark fable.
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Recommended
John Beer, New City, June 8, 2006
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It’s no surprise that Martin McDonagh has
found a ready audience in this nation of immigrants: if playwrights
like Brian Friel drape the Old Country in a nostalgic haze, McDonagh
certifies that our ancestors were well advised to get the hell out.
“The Beauty Queen of Leenane” presents rural Ireland as a murder ballad
come to life, even as it demonstrates the raw power that has rightly
made McDonagh the most celebrated playwright of his generation.
Investing this tale of a ferocious mother-daughter conflict with both
tragic inevitability and a wicked sense of surprise, McDonagh attacks
the theater with the same blend of reverence for the medium and cool
disregard for convention that Quentin Tarantino brings to filmmaking.
This solid production by
Actors Workshop centers on the explosive relationship of daughter
Maureen (Jacqueline Grandt) and mother Mag (Debra Rodkin). While
Rodkin’s monstrous self-pity and impressive fright wig evoke Shelley
Winters, Grandt inhabits Maureen’s full range of hurt vulnerability,
tenderness and vicious cruelty; I expect she’d make a fascinating Lady
Macbeth.
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